Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt (16 page)

The obelisks, still in place in Alexandria in 1820, confirm the location of the Caesareum, which survives today as a series of massive foundation walls. The most complete description of this building dates to
AD
40:

For there is elsewhere no precinct like that which is called the Sebas-teum, a temple to Caesar on the shipboard, situated on an eminence facing the harbours … huge and conspicuous, fitted on a scale not found elsewhere with dedicated offerings, around it a girdle of pictures and statues in silver and gold, forming a precinct of vast breadth, embellished with porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways and wide open courts and everything which lavish expenditure could produce to beautify it …
²¹

A military text adds some welcome detail: there were at least two storeys, more than one staircase and a marble statue of Venus.

Cleopatra’s palace has vanished, but is likely to have been situated in or close by the Palaces district, maybe on Antirrhodos.

CHAPTER FOUR

Cleopatra and Julius Caesar

… The young queen had little to fear so long as she had at her side the greatest Roman of the moment.

Grace Macurdy,
Hellenistic Queens
¹

W
ith Cleopatra and Ptolemy officially reunited there was perhaps a faint chance that the threatened civil war might be averted. The Roman poet Lucan, writing
c
.
AD
65, tells us that Cleopatra threw a lavish banquet to celebrate this new beginning:

…The wanton’s [Cleopatra’s] prayers prevailed and, by spending a night of ineffable shame with her judge, she won his favour. When Caesar had made an expensive peace between the pair [brother and sister], they celebrated with a banquet. With pomp the Queen displayed her luxuries, as yet unknown to Roman fashions … There in her fatal beauty lay the Queen thickly daubed with unguents, content neither with her throne nor with her brother spouse. She lay laden with all the Red Sea spoils on her neck and hair, faint beneath the weight of gems and gold.
²

But Lucan is writing the equivalent of modern tabloid journalism, and his entertaining account needs to be taken with more than the usual pinch of salt. In reality no one, Caesar excepted, was happy with the new power-sharing arrangement and, as Pothinos secretly summoned Ptolemy’s army from Pelusium, the Alexandrians started to arm their slaves. Caesar’s meagre band of soldiers soon found themselves outnumbered by Ptolemy’s far larger army of well-trained Gab-inians. Securing the Palaces, Caesar hastily sent for reinforcements. He had just one card up his sleeve. Cleopatra and her siblings Ptolemy XIII, Arsinoë and Ptolemy XIV were all his guests – willing or unwilling – in the Palaces.

Suetonius summarises and sanitises the Alexandrian Wars:

… a most difficult campaign, awkward both in time and place, fought during winter within the city walls of a well-equipped and cunning enemy; but though caught off his guard, and without military supplies of any kind, Caesar was victorious.
³

In fact four months of vicious land and sea battles combined with a guerrilla-style urban war brought devastation to Alexandria. Caesar’s own account of the struggles tells us that the city, built from stone and tile with very little wood, seemed virtually immune to fire.
⁴
‘Seemed’ is the operative word here. When Caesar torched the Egyptian fleet in the harbour, the fire spread to the Palaces and part – maybe all – of the library was lost. Eventually Caesar was able to take control of Pharos, and to keep the harbour open. But things were not going well, and the Alexandrians managed to build a new fleet from scraps of wood recovered in the town. At one low point Caesar almost drowned in the Mediterranean. Forced to swim for his life, he kept his all-important military plans dry by holding them above his head, but lost his cloak to the sea. Retrieved by the enemy, it was displayed as a war trophy.

Just as Cleopatra had maintained a conspicuous silence during her
elder sister’s ill-fated reign and its bloody aftermath, so she remained silent and, as far as we can tell, inactive throughout the Alexandrian Wars. Younger and less experienced, the fourteen-year-old Arsinoë was not content to bide her time. Having escaped from the Palaces, and supported by her influential tutor Ganymede, she joined forces with Ptolemy’s general Achillas. In November 48 the people of Alexandria proclaimed Arsinoë queen of Egypt: a rival to Cleopatra and a future wife for Ptolemy XIII, who was still the crowd’s favourite. Soon after, Pothinos’s treachery was discovered (Plutarch tells us that he was betrayed by Caesar’s barber) and he was executed, while Achillas was killed by the ambitious Ganymede. This left Ptolemy XIII isolated, and Ganymede in command of the army. He was to prove an innovative commander, earning Caesar’s grudging respect by polluting the subterranean water cisterns with saltwater. Caesar was only able to counter this by ordering his men to dig day and night until they struck ground water.

Next, the people of Alexandria, apparently tiring of life under Arsinoë and Ganymede, made a curious request:

The Alexandrians, perceiving that success confirmed the Romans, and that adverse fortune only animated them the more, as they knew of no medium between these on which to ground any further hopes, resolved, as far as we can conjecture, either by the advice of the friends of their king who were in Caesar’s quarter, or of their own previous design, intimated to the king by secret emissaries, to send ambassadors to Caesar to request him, ‘To dismiss their king and suffer him to rejoin his subjects; that the people, weary of subjection to a woman, of living under a precarious government, and submitting to the cruel laws of the tyrant Ganymede, were ready to execute the orders of the king: and if by his sanction they should embrace the alliance and protection of Caesar, the multitude would not be deterred from surrendering by the fear of danger.
’
⁵

It is hard to make sense of this development. Caesar’s
Alexandrian Wars
tells us that Ptolemy, who had developed an intense loyalty to him, begged with tears in his eyes not to be sent from the Palaces. But Ptolemy was bluffing and Caesar, despite his belated recognition that the Alexandrians were ‘false and perfidious, seldom speaking as they thought’, was inexplicably naïve. Believing that Ptolemy’s release might calm the situation, Caesar let him go. As soon as he got clear of the Palaces, Ptolemy wiped his eyes, took up his old command and, ‘like a wild beast escaped out of confinement, carried on the war with much acrimony against Caesar, so that the tears he shed at parting seemed to have been tears of joy’.

Soon after Ptolemy’s defection, troops commanded by Caesar’s ally Mithridates of Pergamon and supplemented by Nabatean and Jewish forces, captured Pelusium and marched west to Alexandria. Caesar sailed to join them, surprising the Egyptians from the rear. There was a short, sharp battle outside the city. Caesar’s allies won, Alexandria surrendered, Arsinoë was captured and Ptolemy XIII drowned trying to cross the Canopic branch of the Nile in a disastrously overcrowded boat. The heavy golden armour that had made it impossible for him to swim was recovered and displayed to the people of Alexandria as proof of their king’s death, but his body was lost in the river. This was to cause Cleopatra problems years later, when a pseudo-Ptolemy appeared to claim the throne with a dramatic and plausible tale of a desperate swim to safety and many years spent in exile. The Egyptian army surrendered on 15 January 47. Caesar, a deeply unpopular victor, re-entered Alexandria in triumph, and joined the equally unpopular Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemy XIV in the Palaces. To thank them for their help in his campaign, Caesar later granted the freedom of the city to the Alexandrian Jews.

Caesar could have annexed Egypt, but did not. Instead, the widowed Cleopatra was reinstated on her throne alongside her thirteen-year-old brother, who, Dio tells us, now became her husband:

… Being afraid that the Egyptians might rebel again, because they were delivered over to a woman to rule, and that the Romans might be angry, both on this account and because he was living with the woman, he commanded her to ‘marry’ her other brother, and gave the kingdom to both of them, at least nominally. For in reality Cleopatra was to hold all the power alone, since her husband was still a boy, and in view of Caesar’s favour there was nothing that she could not do. Hence her living with her brother and sharing the rule with him was a mere pretence which she accepted, whereas in truth she ruled alone and spent her time in Caesar’s company.
⁶

Together, brother and sister were to rule as the Theoi Philopatores Philadelphoi (the Father-Loving, Brother/Sister-Loving Gods), although Cleopatra, barely subscribing to the fiction of joint rule, would defy convention and always place her name first. Sister and brother were to be ‘supported’ in their rule by three, later four, Roman legions. Egypt was, in all but name, a Roman protectorate.

Caesar was now free to return to Rome, yet still he dallied in Alexandria. Contemporary observers, reluctant, perhaps, to suggest that the great Caesar was capable of the twin crimes of laziness and irresponsibility, made no mention of this delay. Modern historians are universally agreed that he dallied because of Cleopatra. The pragmatic view is that he wished to see her properly settled on her throne as a secure and useful Roman client-queen. The more romantic view is that he was simply worn out by many years of campaigning and wished to spend some time with his young mistress.

He often feasted with her to dawn; and they would have sailed together in her state barge nearly to Ethiopia had his soldiers consented to follow him.
⁷

For many centuries Egypt’s pharaohs had sailed up and down the Nile
– Egypt’s highway – in order to confirm their presence to their people. Long, thin Egypt was an awkward country to administer. It could take two weeks for a message to pass from Memphis in the north to Aswan in the south, and there was an ever-present worry that officials living hundreds of miles from the administrative capital might be tempted to forget the king and assume their own quasi-royal prerogatives. A regular royal appearance was a simple and effective way of reinforcing the king’s right to rule, and the Nile was dotted with minor palaces, ‘mooring places of the pharaoh’, where kings could hold temporary court while visiting local governors and making offerings in local temples. The link between large boats and earthly power remains an obvious one today. Only the wealthy can own a large boat; boat ownership brings access to greater wealth and the potential to build more boats. The link between boats and the divine is perhaps less clear to us. But Egypt’s gods regularly processed on the Nile, travelling from temple to temple and crossing from the east bank to the west, while high above the river the sun god Re steered his solar boat across the clear blue sky each and every day.

Now, if Appian and Suetonius are to be believed, Cleopatra was preparing to sail down the Nile and Caesar had agreed to accompany her. Far from a romantic cruise, this was a triumphal public display; a calculated political move designed to make the new alliance crystal clear to everyone who mattered. The fleet of over 400 ships crewed by Roman soldiers which, Appian tells us, accompanied the royal barge simply reinforced the message.
⁸
We have no description of Cleopatra’s barge. But we do have a description, penned by Callixeinos of Rhodes and preserved by Athenaeus, of the magnificent barge or
navis thalamegos
built by Ptolemy IV over one and a half centuries earlier.
⁹
This remarkable vessel was said to be half a stadium long, with a maximum width of thirty cubits and a maximum height of just under forty cubits. It was a multi-roomed, multi-storey floating pleasure palace with five separate restaurants and accommodation for king, queen,
courtiers, servants and crew, and it may well have served as the model for Cleopatra’s own barge.

It is reasonable to assume that Caesar wanted to inspect the land that was, in all but name, his. Lucan suggests that there may have been another motive behind the trip. For many years Caesar – and many others – had been intrigued by the unknown source of the Nile:

Despite my strong interest in science, said Caesar to Acoreus, Priest of Isis, nothing would satisfy my intellectual curiosity more fully than to be told what makes the Nile rise. If you can enable me to visit the source, which has been a mystery for so many years, I promise to abandon this civil war.
¹⁰